Run!

Catherine is headed to her first ever archaeological dig with her college. She’s as happy as can be, living out her dream of being a real-life Indiana Jones. But when she wakes up in the middle of the night and sees a ghostly figure standing over her, watching her sleep, she starts to wonder if her lifelong dream is actually a nightmare.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:06Glynn Washington?

  Ours is not to question why.

• 0:11Glynn Washington?

  Ours is but to do or to die. You're listening to Spooked. Stay tuned.

• 0:25Glynn Washington?

  Spooksters, you have spoken. We want more spook, you said. We want to support the show, you said. And can we please, for the love of all that is holy, please get rid of those ads? Well, prayers answered. Spooked Plus has risen. Ad-free spook. The entire library, no interruptions, just you and whatever's lurking in the shadows. Exclusive bonus stories every month, fresh nightmares you won't hear anywhere else. The Spooked Plus community, listen together, chat in real time because no one should face the darkness alone. And, and, ask me anything for yours truly.

• 1:10Glynn Washington?

  If you've got questions, I've got answers. Maybe. And we're just getting started. Spooksters, we are a small team chasing down the big mystery. Your support keeps this flame burning, so come on in. The door is open. Spooked.supercast.com. That's Spooked.supercast.com. Spooked Plus. Don't turn out the lights.

• 1:51Glynn Washington?

  In this space, this shadow land, people that often want to make the simple things hard, they want to assume deep mysteries and see hidden signs and esoteric understandings. But when you walk down the street and see screaming people fleeing back to other directions, it is not necessary to first query the shrieking folk, asking as to the specific nature of their common distress. No!

• 2:28Glynn Washington?

  No, no, no, no, no, no. If they are fleeing, follow them. Your little questions or whatnot can wait. It's the same thing here.

• 2:46Glynn Washington?

  In this place, if you detect a voice, a feeling, a premonition, an intuition, a suspicion, a foreboding, a vision, a hunch telling you plainly that this is not the place you need to be right now,

• 3:10Glynn Washington?

  run.

• 3:19Glynn Washington?

  Spook starts now.

• 3:48Glynn Washington?

  Now, our storyteller Catherine, she studied archaeology in college. And when she was a senior, she got to head into the field like a real archaeological dig. She went with all the other seniors, a few professors, to a site that her university owned. But I have to tell you, Catherine asked us to keep this location a secret for a very good reason. Spooked.

• 4:28Speaker 01

  I'm really excited to see a large scientific investigation and to get to bond with these people in my program and to kind of really, you know, put my money where my mouth is as far as becoming an archaeologist.

• 4:44Speaker 01

  So we meet on a Monday morning in the archaeology lab. We all pack into the bus and the professor drives down behind us in his pickup truck. We're in the south, but we're not in the deep south. It's farming, tobacco fields, and we're in a largely agricultural area in a river valley. I'm driving down this little unmarked road. It's not dirt road, but it's close. And this was really in the middle of nowhere. Even compared to our small town, this is absolutely the middle of nowhere.

• 5:17Speaker 01

  And then you turn into kind of a dirt driveway and there's this tiny little house.

• 5:27Speaker 01

  My first impression of the house is that it's kind of cute. It's, you know, probably built in the 1920s or 30s. It's this little white wood siding house with a little front porch. And other than the kitchen, students aren't really supposed to be in most parts of the house, which suits me well because it's full of spiders and cockroaches and I don't really want to be in there anyways.

• 5:53Speaker 01

  It's got these creaky wooden floors and these old wooden stairs. And the upstairs, it's got these kind of slanted roofs and you've got some eaves and some little nooks and crannies around there.

• 6:04Speaker 01

  It's a cute little house. It's just very small and old.

• 6:08Speaker 01

  And then over behind the little white house, there's a fire pit and a big ring around it. And then off to one side, there's two pretty rough bunk houses, one for boys, one for girls. No AC, no running water in them.

• 6:25Speaker 01

  The birds are singing. The insects are chirping because we are, again, in the middle of the woods. There's bugs everywhere. And it just feels very cheery, I think is the best word for it.

• 6:40Speaker 01

  We do the fieldwork like a solid 30 minutes away. It's not too far as the crow flies, but the way we have to get there, it's a long drive across a river in the middle of this old battlefield, essentially. I can't really say more about the location of the field school or the site that we dig at. We do tend to have a big problem with looters. If they know that there is a Native American site there, they could potentially dig up graves or other disrespectful things that we don't want them doing. So it's, you know, we get in and we're like looking around. It's like, okay, unload, like, let's go. We've got jobs to do. So excited, but busy is how I was feeling. A couple of days later, we come back from site.

• 7:23Speaker 01

  Our routine is to, you know, you split up and whoever is on dinner crew goes to cook dinner. And then everyone kind of naturally congregate around the fire pit until dinner is ready. Our professor grabs everyone's attention in a way that we can tell he's he's going to kind of make an announcement. The professor goes on to tell us that, you know, the school had bought the property. You know, he told us that they did have to bring on some volunteers and go clean out the house, take all the personal effects out of the house and make it right for our field station purposes. While they were doing this, in a crawl space up in the upper floor,

• 8:01Speaker 01

  they found this diary that had belonged to one of the daughters. He tells us that the property was previously owned by a family. The father worked at the mill and he was an alcoholic and abusive. He got laid off one day and came home and shot his two daughters and his wife and then himself.

• 8:35Speaker 01

  Where it's sitting in circles, really easy to see everyone's faces. And most people are somber and shocked.

• 8:46Speaker 01

  I was just thinking, how terrible.

• 8:50Speaker 01

  And he pretty much says that since there was no other family that they knew of, they decided to just respectfully dispose of the diary by burning it that night and hope that it would kind of set things to peace for that family.

• 9:10Speaker 01

  And he was just saying, you know, just so we're aware, there's, you know, people have said they've heard things or seen things,

• 9:20Speaker 01

  but no one had really had any experiences themselves. I am, you know, very much inclined to believe him because he's my professor and I know him pretty well and I trust him. But at the same time, I think that it sounds a little far-fetched.

• 9:38Speaker 01

  Eventually, people start saying that things are going missing and coming back up places where they shouldn't be, or that they are seeing shadows at night and stuff like that.

• 9:51Speaker 01

  I do have a friend who, one night, he is laying awake in his bunk. He's got a window next to his bunk, and the light from the bathhouse was kind of illuminating the area and he sees this big, tall shadow just slowly walk past his window.

• 10:09Speaker 01

  And in his words, I think his response was "nope", and just turned over and decided to ignore it.

• 10:17Speaker 01

  What freaks him out is that the whole camp is covered in mulch or gravel and you can hear people walking pretty easy. And he doesn't hear any footsteps go by with this big shadow.

• 10:35Speaker 01

  But other than that, there were just little things.

• 10:40Speaker 01

  These stories are prevalent throughout all aspects of camp life. I think they're really fun and I like to hear about them. But again, I don't really think that there's much truth to them.

• 10:54Speaker 01

  We leave the site around 3:00 or 4:00, pack up all our gear, drive back to the camp. And then everyone just ends up hanging out around the campfire until dinner's ready.

• 11:03Speaker 01

  It's not uncommon for alumni to kind of drop in and out throughout the field season as they're able. And one of our more involved alumni had just arrived at camp, you know, just to kind of help out in general for a week or so. He's hanging out with the professors and the assistants during dinner and all that. And then eventually people start to go like, hey, like, do you know anything about this weird stuff that happens here? He's like, well, yeah, actually I have an experience with that.

• 11:55Speaker 01

  He was working on his master's degree. He used our excavation site for his thesis.

• 12:03Speaker 01

  And as such, he's had to go out and do some data collection off-season. So when everything shut up, there's no one there. He did his data collection and he came back. He made a fire because it was cold. It's after dark and he's sitting in front of the fire with the house behind him. And he notices all of a sudden that the light changes. So he turns around to look at what is causing it. He looks up at the house and on the second story, there's a light on and a silhouette at the window just staring down at him.

• 12:37Speaker 01

  He describes it as just a solid black silhouette. Like a big, kind of bulky male figure. He felt a real sense of malevolence coming from it.

• 12:52Speaker 01

  The property is totally empty at this point. It's been shut up for months and locked tight. It freaks him out so much that he ends up, he puts out his fire and he gets in his car without even packing up any of his camping gear. And he drives off.

• 13:07Speaker 01

  Checks into a hotel and stays there until daylight, at which point he comes back for his gear, but refuses to sleep there again by himself.

• 13:15Speaker 01

  Everyone around the fire is freaking out. It's very different from the night that our professor was talking to us. They're all kind of wide-eyed and looking at each other. Heads are going back and forth. People are also kind of like uneasily like looking back into the trees behind us. Like it got everyone kind of on the edge of our seats, like hair on the back of our necks standing up. We hypothesized that it might be the spirit of the father who had committed the murders and suicide there. I'm creeped out, but I'm not willing to just down and out be like, yep, ghost surreal. I'm like, that could have been a squatter or something in the window.

• 14:01Speaker 01

  The rest of the program goes pretty smoothly. The same little rumors are flying around, but nothing new or compelling comes out.

• 14:11Speaker 01

  So on the very last day, we don't go out to the site. We spend the day cleaning up the camp. All the basic chores to get the property ready for us to leave it for another 11 months until we come back for the next field school.

• 14:25Speaker 01

  So as part of this, my friend and I are assigned to sweep out the house. I take the downstairs while she takes the upstairs. And as she's heading upstairs, she pops her headphones in to listen to some music while she does the sweeping. And I'm starting to like scoop up and take out the dust. And my friend comes running down the stairs screaming. And just goes straight outside.

• 14:51Speaker 01

  Down the stairs and straight out the door. Doesn't stop, doesn't look at anyone, just screaming.

• 14:57Speaker 01

  So I run after her and I'm like, what, what happened? What is wrong? And she is standing in the driveway and she's stopped screaming, thank God, but she's just still very visibly shaken. And she says,

• 15:11Speaker 01

  "I felt something pull on the back of my shirt. And I turned around and there was nothing there."

• 15:21Speaker 01

  She says specifically is that it feels like the way a child tugs on your shirt when they want to get your attention. When she says this, I immediately am thinking the upstairs is where the diary of the girl was found. It's where we assume the kids were sleeping. And so my mind kind of instantly jumps to the kids.

• 15:41Speaker 01

  I am kind of cautious as I go up the stairs to finish the sweeping, kind of poking my head around the corner a little. And it's really small. You can see most of the upstairs at one time. And I don't see anything. And I tell myself, this just has to get done. Nothing happens to me at all.

• 16:03Speaker 01

  I feel like it really can't be explained, but mostly I feel like I'm glad to be getting out of there. And I felt relieved.

• 16:14Speaker 01

  My second year at the field school is actually two years later. So I'm there as a helper, more than as a student. I'm showing people the ropes. I'm helping with crowd control and basic responsibilities around camp. I know all these people really well. I have a lot of friends. I'm also here to just have some good times with my friends before I graduate as well. Everything is pretty much the same. We have the same schedule, the same routine, just, you know, a couple meters over from where we had been digging before. The house is the same. The bunks are the same. Everyone still gathers around the fire pit. Everyone's whispering about these rumors of the haunting and of the history of the

• 16:53Speaker 01

  house. And I have more skepticism back. You know, it's a creepy little place, but I'm sure none of this really happened.

• 17:03Speaker 01

  My friend Emily, we got into this routine really early on where she would have to use the bathrooms every night. And the bathrooms are these portable bathrooms all the way across camp in the dark.

• 17:21Speaker 01

  And she didn't want to go alone, and I can't blame her for that. It got to the point where I can just get up, don't even have to be fully awake, just put on my shoes halfway, walk across camp with my eyes half open, and go back and fall back to sleep. I wake up one night, I can see my friend silhouetted against my bed. So I say, "All right, all right, all right," and I sit up and I put my shoes on. And without looking back at her, she's still standing next to my bed. I go over to the cabin and I open the door, and I hold it open behind me, waiting for her to come through. And she doesn't come. And so I look back behind me, and there's no one there.

• 18:05Speaker 01

  My friend is dead asleep in her bunk, and there is no one standing next to my bed. It wasn't one of the other girls who had woken me, and it certainly wouldn't have been my friend, because she couldn't have gotten back into her bed that quickly.

• 18:19Speaker 01

  Could it have been someone else in the bunkhouse? And I know the answer is no, because we didn't hear anything. I would have heard someone else walking around or getting in and out of bed. Sleep paralysis, and so I'm thinking, "What if it was that?" And I'm thinking, "I got up and walked to the door, so it could not have been sleep paralysis."

• 18:39Speaker 01

  And after I exhaust all the possible explanations, I start to really have to admit to myself that whatever that was, it was unexplained, and possibly a spirit or a ghost.

• 18:54Speaker 01

  It takes me a while to fall back asleep, because as much as I'm trying not to think about it, I still, I can't get the image out of my head of that silhouette standing there.

• 19:05Speaker 01

  As soon as I get up in the morning, we hit the ground running with breakfast and getting packed up, but the whole time, I'm still trying to think about what that could have been. And I ask my friend, I'm like, "Did you, did you see anything? Did you get up last night?" She's like, "No, you know, last night was actually the only night where I didn't have to get up." I was like, "So you didn't, you didn't wake me up at all?" She's like, "No, why?" And I was like, "Oh, don't worry about it, never mind."

• 19:34Speaker 01

  I'm afraid that if it came back, I would see more than just a silhouette.

• 19:40Speaker 01

  I'm asleep and I hear the kind of like wrestling and the tap on my shoulder. So I keep my eyes shut and I wait. And eventually, my friend's voice does whisper my name. I think, oh, okay.

• 19:57Speaker 01

  We get up and put our shoes on and leave the bunk. And we open this creaky screen door and down the steps. And in order to get to the porta potties, which are on the opposite side of camp, we have to walk in front of the entirety of the house.

• 20:17Speaker 01

  There is some moonlight coming down like directly from above us, but it really quickly descends into dark shadows within a few feet of the forest's edge on all sides.

• 20:29Speaker 01

  There's no one else out. I don't hear anyone else. I don't see any other lights.

• 20:58Speaker 01

  As my friend is in the bathroom, I'm just hearing like the basic sounds of the woods.

• 21:06Speaker 01

  My heart's beating a little faster. I want her to just hurry up and get a refill with so we can go back to the relative safety of the bunkhouse. She finishes up. The door slams behind her.

• 21:19Speaker 01

  We start walking back towards our cabin. We have our backs to the woods and I just feel so uneasy all of a sudden.

• 21:27Speaker 01

  And I start to feel this prickling on the back of my neck.

• 21:33Speaker 01

  I just felt like there was something behind us that didn't want us there.

• 21:39Speaker 01

  But I don't want to say anything to my friend because there's no point in scaring her, essentially.

• 21:47Speaker 01

  She all of a sudden breaks into a run.

• 21:50Speaker 01

  I don't know why she's running, but I'm sure it's a good reason and I don't want to be out here in the dark by myself.

• 21:59Speaker 01

  We run all the way back to our cabins. We kind of dive into our beds and we don't say a word to each other.

• 22:06Speaker 01

  And I figure it can wait till the morning.

• 22:10Speaker 01

  It was a Friday, which means that we would pack up to drive back to town for the weekend. And my friend and I are driving back in my car. And we were kind of quiet for a few minutes as we start to drive. And then my friend turns to me and says, "What do you think was in the woods last night?" And I said, "I, you know, I don't really know. I just, I just felt really uncomfortable." "Why? What, what do you think was there?" And she says, "Well, didn't you hear the footsteps?"

• 22:42Speaker 01

  And I was flabbergasted because I hadn't heard anything. I'd heard the crickets and I'd heard the frogs, but footsteps I definitely would have noticed. I tell her that I didn't hear anything. She goes really quiet for probably a good 30 seconds. And then she looks at me and she says, "If you didn't hear the footsteps, who told me to run?"

• 23:15Speaker 01

  I was like, "What?" She goes, "A voice whispered in my ear and told me to run. That's why I started running."

• 23:24Speaker 01

  "I started running because you started running. I didn't tell you to run."

• 23:32Speaker 01

  We both had to kind of process that in silence for a few minutes.

• 23:38Speaker 01

  I think it's likely that it was one of the girls, if their spirits are still on that property, telling us to get back to safety. Because the malevolent presence that I felt and that most people have been encountering at that property was most likely the, the father who had committed these murders.

• 24:01Speaker 01

  I think if it was one of the girls that they were looking out for us. I think it's really sad that they are still trapped with this violent presence that murdered them. I think that they were probably trying to protect my friend and I from the same evil that had caused their deaths. I think they probably stay there and keep that malevolent force in check as best they can.

• 24:28Speaker 01

  I still love that site. I'm happy to go back to that property. I'm less happy to spend the night there, but I will still do it if I need to.

• 24:49Glynn Washington?

  No, I would never go back. No, no, no, no, no, no, no. But I'm grateful to Catherine for being brave enough to bring that story back to us. We hear it spooked. Appreciate you. The original score was by Renzo Corio. It was produced by Aaliyah Yates.

• 25:19Glynn Washington?

  Oh, yes. It's happened again, and I hear you more, more. You say more darkness, more encounters, more stories not to fear, more stories you shall have. And if you have a spook story, the world needs to know. Hit us. It's spooked at snapjudgment.org. There is nothing better than a spook story from a spooked listener. And if you like your storytelling in the bright light of day, subscribe to the amazing Snap Judgment Podcast because it might just change your life.

• 26:04Glynn Washington?

  Spooked was brought to you by the team that never ever runs, Nick and Hyde. That goes double for the Mark Wistich and assessment. Our chief spookster is Eliza Smith, Chris Hambrich, Annie Nguyen, Lauren Newsom, Leon Morimoto, Renzo Goria, Taylor Decot, Marissa Dodge, Aaliyah Yates, Zoe Fregno, Greta Weber, Jacob Winnick, Sonak Khan, Tiffany Delisa, Anne Ford, and Fernando Hernandez. The spook theme song was by Pat Massey Miller, "My Name Is Glynn Washington." Know that both good and bad lie on the other side of the veil.

• 26:46Glynn Washington?

  It can be hard to say which is which once you're fired a test. Some will tell you that you are just fine the way you are right now, and that's nice. The others, though, the bad ones will implore you to come to their realm, to meet on their territory. And if you remember nothing else from our talk, remember this: Never, ever, never, ever, never, ever, never, ever, never, ever, turn out the lights.